Row intensifies after PR firm admits trying to place negatively spun comment pieces about Google in newspapers
It has already been sued by rowing-obsessed millionaire twins, accused of breaking numerous privacy laws, and watched its founder Mark Zuckerberg immortalised in a Hollywood film that was far from flattering.
Now the controversies surrounding Facebook's rise to global supremacy also include corporate dirty tricks, after it emerged yesterday that a leading public relations firm employed by the social networking site has attempted to secretly plant negative stories about its bitter corporate rival Google in the US press.
Reacting to a report in the Daily Beast news website, Burson-Marsteller, whose clients have included some of the world's largest corporations, admitted it had tried to place negatively spun comment pieces about Google, written by two former journalists who now work for the PR company, in the national daily USA Today.
Former technology writer Jim Goldman and John Mercurio, an ex-political writer, also pitched negative stories about Social Circle, Google's new social networking tool, to other papers, including the Washington Post.
The writers claimed Social Circle, which allows users of Google's gmail service to interact with each other, would enable the company to compile "deeply personal" dossiers on its customers.
"The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloguing and broadcasting every minute of every day," they wrote, "without their permission."
The alarmist strategy was apparently designed to undermine the new service, which offers users some of the same interactive features that has enabled Facebook to claim close to 1 billion members. None of the stories were accepted by the newspapers in their original form.
It was not the dirtiest of corporate tricks, but nor was it the most sophisticated. Although the two men refused to disclose the name of the client they were working for, a guessing game soon broke out in the American media. Microsoft and Apple were both cited as possible guilty parties, before the Daily Beast, the website founded by former New Yorker editor Tina Brown, reported that Facebook was behind the corporate smear.
Burson-Marsteller conceded yesterday that it had been working for Facebook, and offered an apology. Company spokesman Paul Cordasco told the Guardian: "The client requested its name be withheld on the grounds that it was merely asking to bring publicly available information to light, and such information could then be independently and easily replicated by any media. Whatever the rationale, this was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined."
A spokesman for Facebook said: "No smear campaign was authorised or intended."
But the episode could damage its reputation, just as it seemed to be putting a series of controversies behind it.
Several lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg – including one from the Winklevoss twins, who claimed he had stolen their idea for a social network while they were studying together at Harvard University – have been settled. The billionaire Facebook founder was also forced to announce last year that the company was overhauling its privacy settings, after being accused of making its members' personal information available to advertisers.
Not surprisingly, the Google smear campaign has already spawned a new internet nickname: online wags are now calling Zuckerberg's site "Twofacedbook".